For some people, the pursuit of beauty is never-ending; however, beauty standards change over time, requiring different approaches. Currently, plump lips are a popular style, and so are various methods for plumping them. Popular methods for building fuller lips range from expensive plastic surgeries and injections, to non-intrusive and inexpensive lip plumpers such as lip gloss with blood-flow boosting ingredients, and tools that require significant sucking or suction to draw body fluid to the lips. Surgeries and injections generally create plump lips that last for months, while the fuller lips achieved by their non-intrusive counterparts last only hours.
For those who want the benefits of both sides—non-intrusive, inexpensive, yet long lasting lip plumping and toning effects—facial exercises may be an answer. Various facial exercises, or face yoga, for lip plumping, are activities designed to firm the muscles around a person's mouth and increase blood flow to the lips. Increased blood flow, in turn, stimulates the production of collagen and is believed to eventually result in plumper and stronger lips. Such facial exercises may also strengthen a person's lips, mouth and jaw so that the person is better able to use these muscles in talking, chewing or other oral functions. Such facial exercises and their outcome, are especially helpful for individuals who struggle with physical aspects of producing language, including children with Down syndrome and other speech issues and delays, given that existing tools tend to be only for adults, and often teach against use by children. Such facial exercises are also helpful for individuals such as singers, or musicians who play brass instruments like trombones or tubas, or woodwind instruments like flutes or saxophones (all of which require extensive use of the mouth) to strengthen their lip, mouth and jaw muscles.
Unlike building muscles in the body for which various equipment such as dumbbells, weights, resistance bands, and so on, exists to facilitate the process, toning facial muscles generally involves only facial movements such as lip circles, closed-mouth smiles, and so forth, and therefore can take time before any effects show up. Because the lip and mouth areas contain up to dozens of individual muscles, building lip volume (i.e., a plumping) through muscle strengthening takes time and patience. Moreover, existing lip plumping tools often require a user to engage in heavy sucking, which can have a temporary plumping effect but tends to work against the muscle growth that results in more long-lasting effects. Because the lip plumping and jaw strengthening process by facial exercises is slow, not many people are persistent enough to see the results.
It is well known that in order to tone muscles, muscles must be challenged. Muscles can be challenged by repetitive motions, but if a faster result is desired, a common way to do so is to force muscles to lift or support weights more than they usually do.
Existing lip plumping tools are not configured to work as an exercise weight. Generally, these tools are configured to plump lips merely or primarily by suction and thus have a rim or surface that is pressed up against the lips and its surrounding areas. Such rims or surfaces are normally flat, raised or rounded and often encourage more sucking than is necessary, which can lead to over-plumping and irritation of the lips, swelling, bruising or other unsightly marks on the face. Such surfaces also make it more difficult to establish and hold the light suction required to most effectively exercise the facial muscles and create the effect of lip-plumping.
Therefore, it is desirous to have a non-intrusive and inexpensive tool for toning facial muscles which in turn plumps and strengthens lips, along with other facial muscles including the mouth and jaw.
It is also desirous to have a tool configured as an exercise weight for facial muscles that act on lips in order to speed up the muscle toning and lip plumping process.
Additionally, it is also desirous to have a tool configured as a lip plumper or exercise weight for facial muscles that does not cause over-plumping, irritation of the lips, swelling, bruising or other unsightly marks on the face.